Oxford Symposium on Religion & History

The Oxford Symposium on Religion and History is a forum for the discourse and presentation of papers by scholars who have a particular interest in the study of religion, history, or politics as independent and intersecting disciplines. Canon Brian Mountford MBE, former Vicar of University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, and Fellow of St Hilda’s College at the University of Oxford, will host the August 2026 session.

In a global situation where religion is culturally and politically predominant for many, yet marginalised and diminishing for others, and where spirituality is frequently disengaged from institutional religion, the Symposium regularly explores the place of religion in contemporary society: the nature of belief, the place of ritual, the place of family, the significance of community, the balance between Faith (belief, doctrine, and creed) and Practice (ritual, sociology, ethics, politics).

The Symposium equally welcomes historians engaged with the great questions of our time — empire and its legacies, revolution and social change, and the politics of memory and historical narrative. We also welcome political scientists and policy scholars whose work engages questions of power, governance, and public life. Each discipline stands on its own terms while sharing the common conviction that ideas matter and that Oxford is among the finest places in the world to explore them.